Pick an ingredient and see every recipe that uses it — handy when you're cooking from what's already in the cupboard.
Good Asian cooking leans on a fairly small group of ingredients used in endless combinations. The same fish sauce that seasons a Thai salad sharpens a Vietnamese dipping sauce; the ginger in a Chinese stir-fry also perfumes a Japanese broth. Once you know a handful of them well, you can cook across every cuisine on the site. These hubs are organised that way — each one explains a single ingredient and then lists every recipe that puts it to work, so you can shop your own cupboard rather than a recipe.
The savoury base note of almost every Asian stir-fry, sauce and marinade.
Toasted seeds and oil that add nutty aroma across Japanese, Korean and Chinese dishes.
Fresh, peppery and warming — grated or sliced into marinades, stir-fries and broths.
The bright, sour lift that finishes Thai and Vietnamese dishes.
Anise-scented Thai and holy basil that perfumes curries and stir-fries.
Infused oil that adds heat, gloss and a toasty aroma to noodles and dumplings.
Mild allium used both as an aromatic base and a fresh, raw garnish.
A fragrant, citrusy stalk bruised or sliced into Thai and Vietnamese soups and curries.
Korean dried chilli flakes — fruity rather than fiercely hot.
A sharper, piney cousin of ginger, essential to Thai curries and tom yum.
A liquorice-sweet spice that defines pho broth and many Chinese braises.
The everyday salt-and-umami workhorse, from light to dark.
Fermented anchovy sauce central to Thai and Vietnamese cooking.
Caramel-toned unrefined sugar that rounds out Thai and Vietnamese dishes.
Silken for soups, firm for frying — a versatile protein that absorbs flavour.
Korean fermented chilli paste — sweet, savoury and slow-burning.
The body of Thai curries and the silk in coconut desserts.
Shiitake and other mushrooms add deep, savoury umami to soups and stir-fries.
Fermented soybean paste, the base of miso soup and many glazes.
Crushed for crunch or ground into sauces, from pad thai to satay.
Belly, mince or shoulder — the backbone of ramen, dumplings and char siu.
Fried, soft-boiled or scrambled into rice and noodles across every cuisine.
From yakitori to green curry — the most adaptable protein in the repertoire.
Sliced thin for pho and bulgogi, or slow-cooked for massaman.
Quick-cooking and sweet — a star of pad thai, summer rolls and tom yum.
Each one gathers every recipe on the site that uses that ingredient, alongside a short guide to what it is and how to cook with it. They are built for the moment you have something in the cupboard — a tub of miso, a knob of ginger, a bag of rice noodles — and want to know what to make with it.
Aromatics are the fresh, fragrant elements that build flavour at the base of a dish or finish it — garlic, ginger, lemongrass, chilli, herbs. Staples are the shelf-stable workhorses you cook around: sauces, pastes, coconut milk, noodles and tofu. The split is just a way to browse; many dishes draw on both.
These hubs cover the ingredients that appear most often across the site and reward a little background knowledge. Plenty of supporting ingredients — vegetables, everyday seasonings — are not given their own page simply because they need no special explanation. The full detail for any dish always lives in the recipe itself.
The Asian pantry guide is the companion to these pages: it runs through the essential sauces, pastes, aromatics and staples in one place, with notes on what to buy and how to store each one. The ingredient hubs then go deeper on a single item and link to the recipes that use it.